


as a candle lit in the night

by niniadepapa



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: F/M, Soulmates AU, a combo of many tbh but yeah OKAY, and you see a different color after finding each one of them, because polyrelationships! platonic ships!, more than one soulmate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-02
Updated: 2015-03-02
Packaged: 2018-03-16 01:04:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3468647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/niniadepapa/pseuds/niniadepapa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[soulmates au: you see colors when you touch your soulmate.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	as a candle lit in the night

Emma has never been a touchy person. Not in a ‘I’m touched’ kind of way, choked up watching Jack and Rose floating on that goddamned piece of wood, but in an actual touching people way. It’s not just because she’s learned the hard way how getting close to somebody can potentially mean heartbreak for her - and, in her case, it’s more like ‘surely’ instead of ‘potentially’ - but because it’s easier not to get her hopes up.

If she doesn’t hope, then she won’t break once the world doesn't start swimming in colors after her skin and somebody else’s brush.

 

* * *

 

 

Linda, the waitress she shares shifts with a year after she gave up her son, comments on how her bug is unmistakable. When Emma asks why, the bouncy redhead shrugs and adds with an approving nod ‘Bright yellow? Nice’. She must notice the frown pulling at Emma’s lips, because she gives her an apologetic nod and goes back behind the counter, probably to text her fiancé, who spends every free moment he has at the diner, staring at her like she hangs the moon and the stars.

(Emma should have known that Neal had not only lied about their future in Tallahassee, but also about first seeing the bug crimson red once she crawled inside to steal it and he laid eyes on her.)

She should have known that, as her world stayed in shades of grey, after she saw him in the rearview mirror, it wouldn’t work out with him. But she had wanted to give one big fuck you to fate, to destiny, to the sadistic puppeteer master who cackled at the messy zig zagging her path kept drawing in this world.

 

* * *

 

 

Sometimes, at night, when she crawls into bed and hugs her pillow and stares and stares some more at the wall - a soft peach color, or so her landlord assured her when she had asked (a habit of hers whenever she ends up in a new place, as if by glaring and longingly looking she’d will the color to appear before her eyes) - she recalls the only spark of real color in her life, so brief and charged with regret she sometimes wonders if it was real or just a product of her imagination.

The scrubs that the doctor had been wearing when she gave birth, feet shackled to the hospital bed, had been green.

(It was gone too soon, but the memory was still branded in her mind, along with her newborn son’s cries echoes.)

 

* * *

 

 

On her 28th birthday, a boy knocks on her door, as devoid of color as everything else around them.  

“My name is Henry. I’m your son.”

She hides in the bathroom, gasping silently and willing herself not to freak out in front of her s -  _Henry_. She promises herself she will stay as far away from him as possible, even though she can feel the pull driving her towards the kitchen where she can hear him rummaging in the fridge searching for juice.

(Her heart beats a wild stacatto against her ribcage, the unbidden hunger to  _see_  that shade of light surround her once she let herself cup her son’s cheeks, envelop him in her arms, put a comforting hand on his shoulder.)

She belatedly picks a leather jacket that she bought months prior, after a winking saleswoman had promised her that if that was the first thing that her soulmate saw, then her job was done.

(She had heard about that - romantic soulmates seeing reds first after the first contact of skin on skin, whereas platonic soulmates sometimes swore the first thing they saw were blue and greens until the palette completed itself by the strength of their bond.)

(She had never believed it.) (She still bought the jacket.)

 

* * *

 

 

It isn’t after her first day in Storybrooke, Maine, when she looks for Henry at his castle at the beach, when it happens.

“Your parents were trying to save you from the curse,” he insists, and he’s so close she can pinpoint the subtle grey flicks on his nose, so similar to hers she could cry.

(She  _is_  crying, so there's that.) 

“Sure they were. Come on, Henry.”

She turns, hoping he’ll follow so she can drop him at the mayor’s and leave this godforsaken town once and for all (‘ _Liar_ ’, her mind supplies), and then he’s there, taking her hand in his.

Emma sees the tree cups surrounding the edge of the beach, and her brain whispers ‘ _green_ ’. She freezes, stunned, and gasps as she looks down at Henry, whose smile is so big it could split his face.

“I knew your eyes would be green,” he laughs happily.

Emma knows somehow she’s in trouble: there’s no way she’s leaving this town now.

 

* * *

 

 

Until the curse is broken, Emma sometimes wonders to herself how it is possible that she hasn’t recognized anything as blue since the day she touched Mary Margaret for the first time. She’s the closest she’s ever had to family, the very first real friend since Lily that she has felt a true connection with in her entire life.

It’s not like she needs the validation - even if it happened with Henry, she doesn’t need to follow some hide and seek game to find the people someone has deemed appropriate for her to be closer to.

(She doesn’t think much about it until she discovers Mary Margaret is, in fact, her  _mother_.)

(Real blues only come, ironically, right before she’s about to freeze to death in an ice cave, locked with a strange queen in a stunning diamond covered dress, regal as they come, arm outstretched in front of her in a protective stance so familiar to Emma it makes something inside her break. When Elsa holds her hands and begs her to tell her about her magic, she feels it sparkle through her fingers - but that’s not the only thing that happens. She closes her eyes, telling herself it must be the hypothermia playing games with her drowsy brain, but as Elsa pleads with her to keep talking, she notices her eyes - a paler shade of the same color of her dress.

 _Blue_.

Elsa startles, looking down at the gown for a terse moment until something clicks, and she looks back at her, a question in her eyes. Emma shrugs in response, until a new wave of shivers courses through her, and the blues start dimming, darkness creeping the edge of her vision until she passes out on the frozen ground of the cave.)

 

* * *

 

 

Mary Margaret - her  _mom_ , she reminds herself - tells her once they’re in fairytale land ghost town whatever its name it is that she and David did, in fact, see red when they first touched. Emma snorts, because from what she’s read in Henry’s book, David must have certainly  _‘seen red’_  after Snow White clucked him on the head with a stone.

“I heard some people see yellows instead of red,” Aurora comments after she overhears their conversation.

“Did you?” Mary Margaret asks, and Aurora blushes, if the darker complexion of her skin can be of any indication.

“No, but in my kingdom legend says that some people’s meetings are special, destined for each other no matter time or space. They also say when you see yellow, most of the missing colors follow through.”

Mulan huffs under her breath, and she shares an eye roll with Emma.

(It  _is_  ironic how when Aurora is kidnapped by Cora and they need the poppy seeds to let Mary Margaret into the dream world to find out how to go back home, Mulan is the first one to offer to search for the red flowers, as if she knows this color apart from others.) (Emma doesn’t ask, but the glances that the warrior girl threw their companion now make more sense.)

Emma stays silent, not willing to voice the doubt crawling inside her. She doesn’t tell them that she can actually tell the red flowers apart from the blue ones in the greenery of the Enchanted Forest. She doesn’t tell them how her knife almost slipped from her hand when she put it at  _his_  throat, her other hand gripping the hair at the top of his head when she caught a peek of the red stones on his rings, the pink cardigan Mary Margaret wore, or the burgundy of Mulan’s cape.

She doesn’t say a thing, because she  _refuses_  to admit it.

Captain Fucking Hook just  _can’t_  be her soulmate.

(And if he is, tough shit, because she is not going to say a thing about it.)

(She tries to step on the brief tingle of disappointment at the fact that he hasn’t shown any sign of seeing anything different once she touched him, but then again, from what he told her up the beanstalk, the last two or three centuries of his life have been tinged with blood and revenge, so she can’t really blame him.)

(He very well also may still be in love with his Milah and won’t ever notice that he sparked a new layer of color in her life, so there’s that.)

It’s better this way, she tells herself.

( _Lies_ to herself.)

 

* * *

 

 

She had never imagined blood to be such a  _bright_ , almost blinding red until she sees it matting his hair and forehead, a trickle falling down his cheek and covering the scar by his nose.

(She doesn’t let the panicky thought of it being  _his_  what makes it so bright, or her so uneasy about his well being.)

 

* * *

 

 

She doesn’t take her gloves off when he gives her the pouch containing the bean that will get them to her son. She’s too distressed, too lost, the greens dimming after Henry was dragged through that portal to who knows where. She can’t focus on what she’ll see or what’ll change if she and Hook touch.

She doesn’t need the voice in the back of her head that whispers how she could easily fall for this man in front of her, who is Hook but not so much Hook, not after giving up his revenge and offering to help her find the missing part of her, her first and foremost soulmate -  _Henry_.

 

* * *

 

 

After their kiss in Neverland, she notices how he sometimes furrows his brow as he inspects this and that in the jungle surrounding them. Not only does she know that he has some kind of feelings for her - and after his declaration in the Echo Caves, it’s pretty much useless to ignore that, yeah, he does ‘ _fancy_ ’ her - but she wonders if his reds are now richer, glittering in the pale light of the moonlight in the Neverforests.

If they’re somehow different from the reds left of his past love.

 

* * *

 

 

She doesn’t touch him the rest of their stay in Neverland, nor when they’re back in Storybrooke, and she repeats to herself that it’s better this way.

(And oh, when she finds out about Pan’s curse, how she knows she’s been lying to herself.)

 

* * *

 

 

Even if he doesn’t touch her at the townline before she and Henry escape Pan’s curse, she bites down the regret at knowing that he is the reason why she can tell every shade of red and brown around her: the richness of the earth, the redness in her mother’s eyes after she kisses her forehead, the pink of his lips after he smiles at her ‘Good’.

She has no time to dwell on it, though, as she leaves the Storybrooke sign behind and forgets all about him and the place she had begun to consider as home. She looks at Henry, grinning at him and taking in the half rainbow she can already see through the car window, and never ponders during the entire next year of their lives who may have prompted her to open her eyes to them.

 

* * *

 

 

(He tells her, later, when all is right and said and done, that he  _knew_  the moment he kissed her back in New York. Even if she didn’t know - she didn’t even know who she was, she believed herself in love with somebody else - he did.

“How?” she asks, astonished, because it sounds like what happened to her when Henry was born.

He curls a finger around a lock of her hair, tugging on it and smiling softly. “Your hair. It glimmered, softly, almost imperceptibly, back when I kissed you.”

Her lips curl involuntarily, leaning in to brush them over his.)

 

* * *

 

 

Since they come back to Storybrooke together, it’s like a game of cat and mouse: he gets closer, she shuts off. She gets closer, he disappears. The greens of Zelena’s spells or the emerald at her neck wink at her brighter than ever, the red of Ruby’s lipstick and skirt dazzling against the dull patterned walls at Granny’s. She has heard of colors getting brighter once the bond with the person that triggered them gets stronger, and she can only blame herself for that, since she sees him more like Killian than Hook, an essential part of her life since he brought her back.

She knows she shouldn’t, because she’s  _leaving_ , dammit, and she doesn’t want to hurt him no more than she wants to hurt herself.

It doesn’t stop the colors from getting shinier, cleaner, closer than ever.

And he’s there until he isn’t. He’s not by her side, but at the outskirts, pulling away from her. She sees him wince at the séance when she puts her hand over his brace, and frowns at his reaction.

(Maybe this whole color thing was just bullshit. Maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe her case is just fucked up, just like her entire life, with her shitty magic and shitty past and everything that’s ever been wrong with her.)

(She tells herself she doesn’t care. She has Henry, and they’re leaving, and there’s no coming back from that, reds be damned.)

 

* * *

 

 

At night, in a faraway dream that she won’t even recall when awake, she sees yellows, golds and creams.

 

* * *

 

 

She brings him back to life and swears that she sees a glimmer of a rainbow flying around them, but it’s gone before she can really see it, too worried about him and if he’s breathing or not. It could be the curse on his lips lifting, or something else, but there’s no time to think about it.

 

* * *

 

 

They’re in the past, in a time and place where Emma isn’t even supposed to exist, and she’s with a past version of Killian. This is Hook in all his glory, black coat swishing behind him as he drunkenly staggers through the pier, rum bottle in hand. His crimson vest is so different from his usual black one she can’t stop staring at it.

She kisses him and nothing changes.

(She hadn’t expected anything different.)

 

* * *

 

 

Killian takes her hand and leads her to the ballroom where all the other couples are dancing, and she waits on baited breath, silently telling herself to  _breathe_ , they’re here on a  _mission_ , and there’s no need to be worried if there’s nothing, or something, or what there even is supposed to be because she  _knows_  and he  _knows_  they both see red since they met but  _dammit_  -

\- there’s nothing. Nothing that wasn’t there before, that is - her red gown, his brown coat and the grey of the palace that is supposed to be made of gold.

He doesn’t seem to mind, spinning her around like she’s made of stardust, diamonds and rainbows herself.

(She doesn’t realize until later - Killian wore gloves during their glamoured adventure.)

 

* * *

 

 

...and she’s a lost girl that found her home, and he’s a lost boy who left his behind for her, and as soon as she leans in to kiss him, she can feel the magic glowing inside of her, sparking to life over her skin, making her tingle. Their lips touch, and a flash of golden light falls over them, and Emma feels like she is covered in fairydust, ready to spread her wings and fly. She pulls back and stares around her, taking in everything, - everything she’s ever missed before, everything she hasn’t been able to see and more. 

It’s too much, and not enough at the same time.

She chokes out a laugh, and her hands grip his neck as a reflex, pulling him closer to her. She turns to ask him if he sees it too, and finds him unable to tear his gaze away from her, like there’s nothing he would rather look at for the rest of his life, a whole world in technicolor be damned.

He kisses her again, fingers tangled in her hair, and murmurs something about ‘bloody golden tresses’ against her lips, and her smile clashes with his. 


End file.
